In its quest to be politically correct, the mainstream media has deliberately omitted the important fact that a man recently convicted in the brutal murder of a young college student is an illegal immigrant.

It’s as if this crucial detail, excluded during trial coverage in Virginia last week, is irrelevant. The area’s mainstream newspaper, the Washington Post, omitted any reference to the murderer’s legal status instead referring to him as a “former day laborer.” Other local news outlets avoided the subject all together and one referred to the illegal alien convict as an “undocumented worker” deep in its article.

The story involves a gruesome crime that gripped the area in 2010. A 19-year-old college student named Vanessa Pham gave an illegal immigrant (Julio Blanco Garcia) and his 1-year-old daughter a ride from a shopping center. Garcia apparently told Pham he was sick and needed to go to the hospital.

He ended up stabbing Pham 13 times and the crime, one of the area’s most high-profile homicides, went unsolved for more than two years. When Garcia finally got arrested, he confessed to the murder and admitted he was high on drugs. Years earlier the illegal immigrant had a run-in with police over a drug incident, according to the court testimony of the officers involved in that case. Yet he remained in the country and murdered Pham.

In the police confession video posted by a news outlet Garcia said this: “Like, I can’t even say if I had my daughter with me, because I was really high,” Garcia told police. “I remember I asked [Pham] to drop me off at the hospital, then she took the wrong way. In my mind, because I was really high, I thought she was going to do something to me. I had a knife in my backpack… and then I did what I did.”

Last week a jury found this monster guilty of first- degree murder and sentenced him to 49 years in jail. A group dedicated to documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias discovered the deliberate omission of the murderer’s immigration status in news coverage of the trial. “It’s like this is not public knowledge,” the group, News Busters, posts on its website.

Though the mainstream media claims to be objective in delivering the news, it’s no secret that there is a distinct liberal bias in most coverage and matters involving illegal immigrants are no exception. In fact, earlier this year two of the nation’s most influential media outlets—the Associated Press (AP) and the New York Times—banned the term “illegal immigrants” from being used in stories. The AP actually rewrote its stylebook, which is widely followed by many mainstream newspapers, to prohibit the use of “illegal” to describe a person.